How to fix Latin America’s homicide problem

In the 1990s, the capital of Colombia’s mountainous Antioquia province Medellin had one of the world’s highest-ever recorded murder rates: 380 homicides per 100,000 people. After national authorities wrested control of the city’s poorest communities from paramilitaries, mayor Sergio Fajardo rolled out an entirely new approach to quelling violence. It was known as “urban acupuncture”.

A core tenet of this approach to social urbanism involved pinprick interventions in neighbourhoods experiencing extreme poverty and chronic violence. Government and business invested in first-class community centres, schools and public transit, using parks, gondolas and escalators to bring different parts of the city together.

Around the same time, some 250 kilometres to the south, mayor Antanas Mockus was governing Colombia’s war-torn capital Bogotá. Starting in 1995, he increased the city’s police budget tenfold, introduced alternative sentencing for non-violent offenders, created a new violence prevention department, refurbished rundown public spaces and vastly expanded health and education services for vulnerable citizens.

Escalators move tens of thousands of people in Medellin, bringing disconnected neighbourhoods into the fold. Fredy Builes/Reuters

Homicide epidemic

For over a decade, the Latin America’s homicide rate has been at least three times the global average. Why has the rest of the region failed to grasp these lessons?

Figure 1: Murder in comparison

Latin America’s homicide rates are consistently three times higher than those of other regions in the world. Asterisks denote projections. Homicides Observatory/Igarape Institute/Instinto de Vida

Latin America is where the most murders in the world happen. In 2016, at least 43 of the 50 most homicidal cities in the world – led by San Salvador (El Salvador), Acapulco (Mexico) and San Pedro Sula (Honduras) – were located in the region. Roughly four Latin Americans are killed every 15 minutes.

Things aren’t bad everywhere. Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and, in particular, Chile (with its homicide rate of 2.7 per 100,000) are relatively safe. Even so, their combined average homicide rate of 6.5 per 100,000 is twice that of North America.

Crime doesn’t pay

Rather than replicate these experiences, Latin American governments have responded to rising violence by sinking more money into police forces, prosecutors and prisons.

Today, the region annually invests between US$55 and US$70 billion in public security, says the Inter-American Development Bank, and criminal violence costs the equivalent of 3.5% of total regional GDP in lost productivity, insurance premiums and security provision (both public and private). That adds up to US$261 billion a year or US$300 per person.

Inequality is high on that list. Latin America is home to ten of the world’s 15 most unequal countries, and while the relationship between inequality and violent crime is not causal, there is evidence of a strong correlation.

The region is highly urbanised, with roughly 85% of people living in cities and this has an important role in Latin America’s levels of violence. Across the globe, homicidal violence tends to be hyper-concentrated in peripheral urban areas experiencing chronic disadvantage.

Cities also have a higher density of actual and would-be offenders – unemployed young men. About 13% of Latin America’s 108 million 15-to-24-year-olds are unemployed, which has encouraged a small number of them to commit “aspirational crime”.

Data suggests that Latin America’s murderers are, by and large, young, out of work, out of school and out of options. In Brazil, studies show that a 1% rise in unemployment rates for men results in a 2.1% spike in homicides.

To address these underlying risks, public officials will need to replace ineffective “iron fist” strategies, which have only fuelled violence and mass incarceration, with concrete homicide-reduction plans inspired by what’s worked elsewhere.

And measures that improve school retention rates, offer vocational training, create quality jobs and provide life skills for at-risk youth in the hardest hit neighbourhoods would reap benefits in the longer term.

The campaign is advocating for reductions of on average 7.5% a year in homicide-beset Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Venezuela. If successful, more than 365,000 lives could be spared.

The goal is bold, but also necessary and feasible. Medellin and Bogotá proved years ago that violence is not chronic. Latin Americans, numb after decades of bloodshed, don’t have to simply endure it.

With enlightened and courageous leadership, data-informed policies and a genuine commitment from politicians and citizens alike, the region can be safer.